The famous internet company is being ultra hush-hush over the Google barges being built on both sides of the United States. One Google barge is being constructed in San Francisco Bay and the other Google barge is located in Maine’s Portland Harbor.

Even the local governments have no clue what’s inside the Google barge. For example, San Francisco doesn’t allow the bay to be used for something that can be built on land. So the local government is bound to be nosy but Google has only given vague ideas related to its Google barge project.

The Google barge is a four-story boat with a steel hull that’s about 250 feet long and 16 feet deep. This means the Google barges are significantly larger than the standard barge size.

Even the US Coast Guard investigated the Google barge. So Google has apparently told them what the secret project is really all about but due to confidentiality agreements the coast guard and all the construction crew are prohibited from saying anything.

The rumor mill has run wild for the Google barge project. The most sane idea in the rumor mill is that it’s simply a floating store intended to show off next generation tech like Project Glass. Otherwise, the rumor mill is spitting out idea like mobile sports arenas (too small), dormitories for the poor, and other craziness.

The most likely idea is that it’s a Google datacenter barge. After all, in 2009 Google filed a patent application for a Google barge which was a nautical data center:

“A military presence may be needed in an area, a natural disaster may bring a need for computing or telecommunication presence in an area until the natural infrastructure can be repaired or rebuilt, and certain events may draw thousands of people who may put a load on the local computing infrastructure. Often, such transient events occur near water, such as a river or an ocean. However, it can be expensive to build and locate data centers, and it is not always easy to find access to necessary (and inexpensive) electrical power, high-bandwidth data connections, and cooling water for such data centers.”

One of the biggest costs to maintaining supercomputers and data centers is cooling. These Google offshore data barges could power the cooling systems with wave energy, which is completely free.

What secret project do you think is really housed in the Google barge?